Encyclopedia of the Kuwaiti Dialect in the Light of Lexicography

Abstract

The research has studied “Encyclopedia of the Kuwaiti Dialect” for the Kuwaiti researcher Khalid Abd-Al-Qadir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rashid with a descriptive analytical methodology, and clarified that the idea of writing this encyclopedia has resulted from two connected goals, the first of which is: scientific, apparent and explicit; that benefits the Arabic Library in general, and the Kuwaiti library in particular with an encyclopedia that classifies in a dictionary the Kuwaiti dialect including the wording and significance in the light of the lack of this type of composition. The second of these goals is: documentary, notarial, and concealed, aiming at preserving the identity of the Kuwaiti society, and trying to draw the local and Arabic dialectic boundaries, through monitoring its lexical units, including them in a dictionary, providing all the acoustic, structural, semantic, and contextual? privacies?, and rooting them in the light of the linguistic diversities, and the civilizational, societal, scientific and technical changes that Kuwait had witnessed in the early sixties of the last century after the oil boom which encouraged employment in the territory, so it attracted manpower from different linguistic neighboring and Arabic environments, and non-homogeneous foreign environments that started affecting the Kuwaiti tongue, so it works actively sometimes, but in others it fimbriates, develops, and deviates from the vocal and significance aspects the society has been familiar with. The research has also shown that the encyclopedia has committed itself to a documentary, descriptive, and analytical methodology, based on listening and documentation of the lexical and knowledge material from its resources found in the books of heritage and dialects, also based on rooting the lexical and dialectic units, and tightening the ties of kinship between them and the eloquent and lexical units, for the dialect is a branch of language, and that the distance between them is a sound distance that varies between magnification and thinning, alteration and replacement, embezzlement of a movement or overlooking it, and carving a lexical unit out of two units or more to maintain agility and to save more effort. The research has confirmed that the encyclopedia is faithful to Kuwait’s linguistic, historical, and heritage identity, and that it is consistent with the subjects of art and the scientific technologies in the light of modern lexicography.